The ever-changing generative patch challenge?

Music & Patches
21

Thank you very much, you touch on a lot of really great ideas: S&H, slew limiter, Bernoulli gate, flip/flop, edge detector, fixed voltage, offset, comparator and accumulator. The latter two can be combined. Resetting allows cycles/loops as well as counters.

@docB has a number of excellent (although sometimes deep) modules, and if you have the time, it for sure is valuable to look at some use cases, including many by the developer: docB at Patchstorage.

Another approach to keep things interesting seems to be the application of short-term generative and non-generative techniques to longer time frames, which sort of adds another meta level. I think of it as being like extending smaller circles into larger ones, as if constructing an epitrochoid.

For example, one could create a short melody sequence, let’s say with a note on every beat, so it is repeated in a relatively small circle for a while. To create the variation in the longer run, changing the melody’s key (and possibly scale) based on the note sequence would lend a structured, interlaced variation to the flow.

The timbre of a voice could be morphed or rotated round-robin style with each switch of the scale, perhaps on a slightly shorter or longer cycle.

Or you could use a Euclidian rhythm of e.g. 12 over 32 to repeatedly drive a percussion over e.g. two bars, and then take the same rhythm slowed down by 1/40th and thereby stretch out the pattern over 80 bars to rhythmically but infrequently trigger a slowly morphing sound or FX, or a one-shot sequence.

It probably is debatable whether mixing generative and deterministic elements invalidates a patch as being truly ‘generative’, but to me a lively semi-generative patch with a tiny bit of structure is preferable over a wild but repetitive purely generative piece.

There already is a number of good threads with tips for generative patches in this forum (selection below), and I want to explore further, which of these techniques could also be suitable for their use in the larger circles.

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